Catholic News Service

Repeatedly referring to the four U.S. churchwomen murdered in El Salvador in 1980 as "martyrs," Cardinal Michael Czerny insisted that in the end they triumphed because "brutal crimes failed and fail to stop the evangelizing."

Chalatenango, Bishop Oswaldo Escobar Aguilar said, means "valley of sand and water" in the area's indigenous language, "but in the 1980s, it became a valley of blood." And some of the blood spilled was that of the four U.S. Catholic women.

Remembering the three U.S. religious women and a laywoman brutally murdered during El Salvador's civil war, Pope Francis hailed them as examples of faith and missionary discipleship.

Anyone who mocks disabled children is mocking God, Sr. Olivia Umoh said.

How the women lived and worked inspired Melissa Altman and her husband, Peter, to move their young family to El Salvador.

Dominican Sr. María Isabel Hernández Rea, 52, was struck in the leg Nov. 18 when her humanitarian relief team came under gunfire while attempting to take food to a group of Indigenous Tzotzil people who had been forced to flee a hamlet in the municipality of Aldama due to a land dispute.

Their decades-long ministry has focused on being a witness, living in solidarity with the poor and raising awareness of what they consider the corrosive effects of U.S. policy toward Latin America.

India's Supreme Court dismissed Catholic Bishop Franco Mulakkal's second appeal seeking to clear him of charges of raping a woman religious, clearing the way for trial in a district court.

One in three people who inquire about religious life has an average student loan debt of $28,000, according to the National Religious Vocation Conference.

In a year when a pandemic has entangled lives across the globe, Presentation Sr. Carrie Link painted an icon that may help Catholics straighten them out.

Much attention was given to church teaching on assisted suicide and euthanasia when the Vatican released its Sept. 22 letter "'Samaritanus bonus,' on the Care of Persons in the Critical and Terminal Phases of Life," but Sr. Maureen Weiss focused on the document's guidance on accompanying the dying, a key component to her vocation.

Religious sisters have launched a global movement to overhaul the way religious orders practice their "charism of care" for orphaned or abandoned children.

On Sept. 24, Providence Sr. Barbara Battista stood across the street from where her spiritual directee died just two days before.

Sister Norma Pimentel, a Missionary of Jesus and executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, has received numerous awards over the years for her work in Texas with migrants along the U.S.-Mexican border, and she can now add a new title to her list: one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

The National Black Sisters' Conference issued a "clarion warning" to U.S. Catholics saying church members and leaders have not done enough to speak out against the sin of racism.

When it comes to social distancing, cloistered religious communities are way ahead of everyone.

Individual rights and freedom obviously are essential for human flourishing, but human happiness depends a lot on relationships — kinship and friendship, but also the broader common good, said Dominican Sr. Helen Alford.

Two missionary sisters captured by rebels in northern Mozambique were released unharmed after 24 days, according to their congregation, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery.

Sr. Catherine McNamee, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet and longtime Catholic educational leader, died Aug. 30 at the age of 89. She was living at her order's residence in St. Paul, Minnesota.

On a bright and clear January afternoon, Bishop Oswaldo Escobar Aguilar walked into a cemetery and gently dusted off a white name plate on top of a sky-blue block of tombs. Making plans for the year ahead, he told secretary Violeta Esmeralda Serrano nearby that they needed to make sure the tombs were decorated with flowers Dec. 2.